The herbs she’d hung from the ceiling in the back room were dried and ready to grind, and she’d decided to keep them in containers beneath the glass counter where people could see them. Occasionally, she would break into song, her rich, throaty alto filling the empty spaces in the room and rattling the prisms dangling from the tree branch that served as a jewelry stand. Her grandmother hobbled in from Verna’s house in the back and lingered in the doorway, smiling at the picture the younger woman made. She was tall and lush, with full breasts, narrow hips and long, lovely legs that just now were exposed through the slit of the calf-length, flowered skirt she’d knotted around her waist. She had golden eyes, a small pert nose and a thick mass of tawny ringlets twisted on top of her head and secured with a chopstick. Only the caramel color of her skin and the fullness of her lips revealed her African heritage. Verna Lee was approaching forty-two, but no one looking at that vivid, expressive face would have marked her as a day over twenty-five.
